High school students to visit VCU for inaugural Computer Science Day

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High school students from across Virginia will visit Virginia Commonwealth University on Saturday, Nov. 8, to get a glimpse of the possibilities of high-level computer science.

The inaugural Computer Science Day, hosted by the Department of Computer Science in the School of Engineering, will expose 50 high school students interested in computer science to cutting-edge topics such as quantum computing, natural language processing, and modeling and simulation.

"This is an event we conceived of to expose high school students to more advanced and interesting areas of computer science, beyond what they might normally see in high school," said Sevag Gharibian, Ph.D., an assistant professor of computer science and organizer of the event. "High school students often see only programming in high school, and thus tend to equate computer science with programming. We’re aiming to break this misconception, to show them that there’s much more to the picture."

In the morning, the students will hear talks by Gharibian and two other computer science faculty members, Bridget McInnes, Ph.D., and Preetam Ghosh, Ph.D.

"These talks will be for a public audience,” Gharibian said. ”It's not going to be technical by any means — it's supposed to be fun, and give a high-level look at the research that's happening here."

After lunch, the students will hear about computer science career opportunities from CapTech Consulting, a Richmond technology firm, and the nonprofit CodeVA, which works to expand public school computer science education offerings across Virginia.

At the end of the day, the students will visit with college students taking part in the School of Engineering's RamHacks, a 24-hour programming marathon in which teams of students from VCU and elsewhere compete by designing and building software and hardware applications.

"We're going to get RamHacks people to come down and give [the high school students] a tour to show them what they're doing,” Gharibian said. “The goal is to get everyone’s competitive spirit going, ideally so that when they graduate from high school to university, they can hit the ground running."